Artificial intelligence is being used to predict gambler behaviour - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/30/bookies-using-ai-to-keep-gamblers-hooked-insiders-say <comment> le-flaneur The article had VERY little to say about AI. Nothing described in the piece is anything more than what physical/online retailers, Amazon, Facebook, et al do to retain customers and drive sales.

<comment><USER2> Time for a fork of [https://github.com/panicsteve/cloud-to- butt](https://github.com/panicsteve/cloud-to-butt).

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You can actually take most of the bullshit out of an "AI!!!!" headline by simply replacing "AI" with "computers".

"Artificial intelligence is being used to predict gambler behaviour" \--> "computers are being used to predict gambler behaviour"

I think it's a lot more reflective of what's actually going on and removes a lot of the clickbaity hype...

<comment><USER4> I think it's more accurate if you replace it with "statistical analysis" instead. The computers are just computing very complex equations with your data as an input, but technically you could try doing it by hand.

<comment><USER5> That was actually how my stats prof made us learn all of the analyses, she thought if you can't do it by hand you won't understand what the computer is doing either. I found that to be really useful for just about every statistical technique I have used.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm aware of one gambling company which looks up customer addresses on Google Street View to see in what kind of place they live. If you look wealthy they will send the big guns after you.

</comment><comment><USER7> "Every click is scrutinised in order to optimise profit, not to enhance a user's experience."

So identical to every modern digital business then....

<comment><USER8> I've seen user experience degrade across the board on apps over the last 5 years for what I assume is precisely this reason.

These are not the robots we were promised.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > "I've often heard people wonder about how they are targeted so accurately > and it's no wonder because its all hidden in the small print."

> Publicly, gambling executives boast of increasingly sophisticated > advertising keeping people betting, while privately conceding that some are > more susceptible to gambling addiction when bombarded with these type of > bespoke ads and incentives.

Meanwhile, in the real world, hardly anyone clicks on a banner ad ever. A perfectly polished targeted turd is still a turd.

<comment><USER10> > in the real world, hardly anyone clicks on a banner ad ever

In _our world_. Let's be honest, there has to be a category of people that still falls for them, otherwise people wouldn't keep investing billions into this bullshit industry.

The tech-illiterate are still very much prey for ads, I've had first hand evidence of this a few days ago from my flatmate (the typical idiot who "logs in with Facebook" everywhere, has 50k+ unread email on a Yahoo address and reuses the same password everywhere) when she fell for some weight loss pill scam ad on Facebook. I had to help her chargeback the transactions with her credit card provider.

<comment><USER9> > In our world. Let's be honest, there has to be a category of people that > still falls for them, otherwise people wouldn't keep investing billions into > this bullshit industry.

Not just in "our world." The average CTR is 0.06%, and that's from Google's figures [1], 60% of banner ad clicks are accidental, 54% of Internet users have _never_ clicked one. 25% use ad blockers.

They persist because they're a) cheap, b) because everyone else does it, and c) because they may, tangentially, have some brand uplift though no-one can actually prove it. Some desperately dastardly mindfuck scheme they are not.

[1] [http://www.richmediagallery.com/learn/benchmarks](http://www.richmediagallery.com/learn/benchmarks)

<comment><USER11> I imagine that my CTR must be much higher than average, because I will click on any ads for brands that I dislike. The idea being that I am transferring money from the advertiser to the site that I am visiting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Revealed" is really clickbait titling. Reading the article, it has very little to do with AI, and nothing novel.

</comment><comment><USER13> In a couple of weeks: "Revealed: how amazon uses AI to keep shoppers shopping" and then "Revealed: how pornhub uses AI to keep ..."

</comment><comment><USER14> Since it seems unlikely that governments will ban the use of data by companies for certain purposes like this or pay citizens a universal income for simply providing data to companies online, at least in the near-term, this seem like a ripe opportunity for more "counter-AI" and/or privacy apps.

I love using Ghostery to provide privacy. Why aren't there more consumer- facing apps that provide privacy or indicate when and how consumers may be manipulated by algorithms? Say you _paid_ (nothing's free) an app to monitor your internet activity, allowing it to track and indicate how your personal habits may be exposing you to bias/bad decisions? I think this could help provide the average consumer with a sanity check. Knowing that you're being manipulated and someone is making a profit at your expense probably is one of the biggest motivators to alter human behavior, at least in Western society.

But hey, I still refuse to get Amazon Prime, so what do I know about the average consumer behavior.

</comment><comment><USER15> What is the difference from any other marketing efforts to sell us buying expensive stuff we really don't need?

</comment><comment><USER16> Do we really have to call anything that touches data science a bit AI.. that's almost just clickbait.

<comment><USER17> The media does a terrible job of describing AI/ML.

My roommate was under the impression that Facebook shut down their experiment wherein chatbots communicated with each other because they were scared of the consequences of the machines communicating in their own language.

For the unaware, Facebook determined it wasn't useful to continue the exercise.

<comment><USER18> This isn't terribly hard to achieve. E.g with a pretrained LSTM generator downloaded from some place that does neural network stuff + a homebrew text classifier (I'm fond of character-level online linear models with long n-gram ranges) that's just underpowered enough to overspecialize to a certain style, but unpredictably so. Make this poor man's model generative by choosing random combinations of characters that hit a high enough score; and then feed it to the LSTM (along with normal text samples).

The underpowered generator creates weird stuff that the good generator absorbs into its language model. Boom, you are witnessing the technological singularity. Or something.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> AI is used to predict XYZ. Well, given the short sentence describing ML is "how to make predictions from data", this is really not surprising. Now, what is the success rate is the only question that matters.

</comment><comment><USER20> Supercharging peoples addiction to their phones, an even bigger dopamine hit if there is a chance you might win money too.

Given the amount of time it has taken to tackle the outdated FOBT machine legislation in the UK I can't see the gambling companies being slowed anytime soon.

</comment><comment><USER21> Sometimes I wonder is there new research in the world of advertising and AI?

Tracking clicks via heatmaps, pageviews etc has been done for ages. So, has AI/ML provided better ways to convert those ads?

<comment><USER22> There are improved models for segmenting customers, predicting next best actions etc. It's also a lot easier to run them now (e.g. handling terabytes of data isn't difficult, petabytes is increasingly common)

So it's improved a bit but not much more. The people selling this stuff are marketeers selling to other marketeers, so the sales pitches are getting better and better for sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> the gambling industry pioneered a lot of the techniques now used for web sites, far earlier.

"time on device" is something they coined and started optimizing for decades ago.</comment>


Source code for 4kb demoscene production "Elevated" released - <AUTHOR> https://files.scene.org/view/resources/code/sources/rgba_tbc_elevated_source.zip <comment><AUTHOR> Release info: [http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=52938](http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=52938)

Binary: [https://files.scene.org/view/parties/2009/breakpoint09/in4k/...](https://files.scene.org/view/parties/2009/breakpoint09/in4k/rgba_tbc_elevated_2016.zip)

Video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jB0vBmiTr6o](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jB0vBmiTr6o)

Everything you see and hear is procedurally generated by the 4096 byte executable, in real time. It still blows my mind 7 years after release...

<comment><USER2> 4KB using directx/opengl, very different from old time writing stuff directly in the video card.

<comment><USER3> Exactly, 4kb on top of the hundreds of megabytes of libraries and drivers.

<comment><USER4> Somehow you make it sound easy or even belittling it.

I'd say this is quite an achievement anyway when I know I'd use more space than that just to store a single jpeg or mp3 sample.

<comment><USER5> I think what parent was trying to say is that it's absolutely an achievement relative to storing a jpeg or mp3 sample, perhaps not so impressive next to the old 4k intros.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For anyone interested/thinks this stuff is cool, the author of Elevated has made a website for experimenting with real time pixel shaders in WebGL: [https://www.shadertoy.com/](https://www.shadertoy.com/)

Some pretty incredible things have been done there.

<comment><USER7> A friend of mine also has this project, [http://shaderfrog.com/](http://shaderfrog.com/)

Let's you experiment with and compose different shaders.

<comment><USER8> This is brilliant, I use shadertoy a bit to quickly test out where I've gone wrong in my fragment shaders (which is usually the whole thing).

This actually seems like it'll be much better for the job.

I'd love to see ISF export added too: [https://www.interactiveshaderformat.com/spec](https://www.interactiveshaderformat.com/spec)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> After viewing LFT's work in using an ATMEL microcontroller as a demoscene platform: [http://www.linusakesson.net/scene/craft/index.php](http://www.linusakesson.net/scene/craft/index.php)

...I had the thought a possible frontier in demoscene is make your own hardware out of discrete components to run your demo.

The MOnSter 6502 would count - [http://monster6502.com/](http://monster6502.com/)

<comment><USER10> Just because that wasn't enough, lft has _also_ written a demo which created a custom CPU/GPU on an FPGA to run a demo:

[http://www.linusakesson.net/scene/parallelogram/](http://www.linusakesson.net/scene/parallelogram/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Most programming jobs must feel terribly boring for anyone who managed to write that.

<comment><USER12> Here's what he's been up to lately: [http://mygtc.gputechconf.com/quicklink/esLu6kr](http://mygtc.gputechconf.com/quicklink/esLu6kr)

<comment><USER13> Will an online recording be available of that talk? I'd love to watch it.

<comment><USER12> Officially, I think the videos from GTC2016 are behind a free registration wall. You can register here: [https://mygtc.gputechconf.com/form/account](https://mygtc.gputechconf.com/form/account)

Unofficially, you can find this particular talk here: [http://on- demand.gputechconf.com/gtc/2016/video/S6860.html](http://on- demand.gputechconf.com/gtc/2016/video/S6860.html)

<comment><USER13> Sweet, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> In year 2000 when I was 16 years old 64k fr-08 by farbrausch told me that I know nothing about programming ;)

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3n3c_8Nn2Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3n3c_8Nn2Y)

<comment><USER15> Indeed, and for me, before that, Future Crew's Second Reality.

<comment><USER16> Second Reality was the best. First demo that I saw was Spaceballs' State of the art [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5kuYfTCGLg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5kuYfTCGLg) and I vividly remember of thinking 'wtf is that, a video or what?' and then Second Reality a year later or so - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFv7mHTf0nA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFv7mHTf0nA) But then (I look all and every demo out there by then at the age of 13) I saw Mars demo [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zSjpIyMt0k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zSjpIyMt0k) which hooked me forever on the path of graphics programming.

<comment><USER15> Oh yes! I remember Mars! At some point, the was a text floating around the net which described how it worked, that was mind-boggling for the 14 year old me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Although they generally didn't compete in the 4kb genre, Farbrausch open- sourced many of their demos and demo-making tools a few years ago [1].

fr-041: Debris [2], and kkrieger [3] (the 96kb FPS) are particularly worth checking out for the uninitiated.

[1] [https://github.com/farbrausch/fr_public](https://github.com/farbrausch/fr_public)

[2] [https://youtu.be/wqu_IpkOYBg](https://youtu.be/wqu_IpkOYBg)

[3] [https://youtu.be/2NBG-sKFaB0](https://youtu.be/2NBG-sKFaB0)

</comment><comment><USER18> Does this mean that lots of 3:30 minutes 1080p videos could be compressed into 4kb?

EDIT: We can be generous and say 40kb for sake of adding more colours / etc.

<comment><USER19> This is actually an insightful question.

The practical answer is _no_. There is an unimaginable amount of possible 3:30 minute vidoes—far more than the number of possible 4kb or even 40kb files.

To be fair, most of those possible vidoes are just noise. We don't have to be able to compress those because people don't care if one video of noise is different from another. We also don't have to reconstruct the video _perfectly_ : as long as it looks more or less the same, the audience is happy. (This is called "lossy compression".)

But even with these caveats, there is no realistic method for compressing realistic 3:30 minute videos that well on a computer. We likely can't do all _that much_ more than current compression algorithms without a different set of tradeoffs. (Like being better at some videos but worse at others.)

That said, a big part of how compression works is by relying on information already present when decompressing. This demo relies on having a particular kind of chip with certain capabilities (ie a CPU and a GPU) and presumably some standard library functions... etc.

How well could we "compress" videos if we had more information available when decompressing? Here's a fun thought experiment: what if we had _a model of a human mind_? We could then feed in a pretty sparse description and have the model fill in the details in a natural intuitive way. It would be _very_ lossy, but the results would be compelling.

And you know what? That's a decent mental model of how speech works! If you just look at information content, spoken words are not very dense. But if I describe a scene you can imagine it almost as if you're seeing a video. This works because we both have the same sort of brain as well as shared experiences and intentions.

You can think of speech as incredibly effective—but also rather lossy—compression.

<comment><USER20> 4K of English text is a couple of pages of a novel, enough to describe a character and a situation, maybe an interaction. A good writer can conjure up a whole world in 4K... but probably not a description of an arbitrary 3 and a half minutes of activity.

<comment><USER18> That being said, speech is far from the best compression we can ever hope of achieving.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> classic 4k, beautiful stuff. here's another one of my favourites from 5 years ago:

zeo-x-s/cdak

[https://vimeo.com/25284552](https://vimeo.com/25284552)

[http://prostheticknowledge.tumblr.com/post/73734927255/cdak-...](http://prostheticknowledge.tumblr.com/post/73734927255/cdak- by-quite-orange-demo-written-in-4k-and)

Beautiful soundtrack from Lassi Nikko (tpolm/orange) and crazy cool raymarching shader work from unc (quite)

shadertoy version with VR support:

[https://www.shadertoy.com/view/MdyGzD](https://www.shadertoy.com/view/MdyGzD)

</comment><comment><USER22> I know a RasPi doesn't have near the specs needed to run this but I'd love to gut an old flat screen monitor and put it in a frame with a RasPi running something like this, generating random "art" and hang it on a wall somewhere...

<comment><USER23> you mean like this? [https://www.electricobjects.com/](https://www.electricobjects.com/)

<comment><USER22> That's awesome! Thank you for that link, a little pricy but the screen would be nicer than what I have laying around and it's more plug-and-play, bookmarked!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> also impressive: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger)

<comment><AUTHOR> Conspiracies 64kb demo from earlier this year is fantastic too.

[http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=67106](http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=67106) / [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRVTI2y0BBg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRVTI2y0BBg)

<comment><USER25> Awesome stuff, yet it was only voted 2nd in the competition (Revision 2016 64kb compo). Here's the winner (fermi paradox by mercury):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZ6ZzJeWgpY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZ6ZzJeWgpY)

The scenes with the moon being peppered with impacts (3:31) and what appears to be storms on Jupiter are beautiful.

<comment><USER26> As someone who was there: Darkness was impressive for sure, but not all that fun to watch, since it was mostly static dioramas, which the viewer can grok in a few seconds, and then it goes "oh and each one has a little jiggle too". Camera movement is minimal, and even when its there it doesn't expose anything new in the scene to the viewer. Additionally every scene is mostly faked with very obvious 2D shapes, meaning if the camera moved too much, the illusion would break. Lastly, the music was quite dull and not connected with what was on screen.

Fermi Paradox was also dioramas, but: Each one had had some engaging event happening, or at least well directed camera movements that exposed new visuals to the viewer over time or show-cased the full 3d nature of each scene. Additionally each scene had at least one well done graphics effect. The music was almost movie quality and in a few parts nicely synched up with the visuals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> If people wonder why I'm so obsessed with computers, this is the reason.

</comment><comment><USER28> This was one of my favorite demos back in the day. I still have a copy of it (along with 10~ other favorites) sitting in a "Demoscene" folder somewhere. Many of them don't work on today's hardware/software, sadly (including this one).

It's great that it's open source now! That means if someone's really motivated, they can update it to run on modern environments (by no longer keeping it 4 KB), even OS X, etc.

</comment><comment><USER29> And I had been planning to reverse engineer it for some time, but never got around to doing it.

Hats off to Inigo and others.

</comment><comment><USER30> Am I the only one who's reminded of the Excel 97 easter egg?

</comment><comment><USER31> Here's their release of how they made it as well. Super interesting read. It's shaders all the way down.

[http://www.iquilezles.org/www/material/function2009/function...](http://www.iquilezles.org/www/material/function2009/function2009.pdf)

<comment><USER32> Ha, that's my exact comment from the related reddit thread. Kinda cool, I wonder how often that happens?

[https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/4msf41/elevate...](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/4msf41/elevated_the_winning_4k_from_breakpoint_2009_is/d3y5g9x)

<comment><USER33> You do realize he copied your comment, don't you?

<comment><USER34> That's been happening a bit recently.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11837687](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11837687)

(I think there are others, but I can't find them now.)

<comment><USER35> Both usernames end in 2

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Can someone TLDR how this stuff works?! I NEED TO DO IT!

</comment><comment><USER37> That's unreal. On what kind of graphics hardware, though? Seems like it probably offloads most of the work on GPU whereas we'd have had to do most of it in software on HW weak enough that 4KB size actually mattered. And probably not achieve this demo.

<comment><USER38> The 4kb restriction isn't there to make it run on weak hw, it's there to push people.

<comment><USER39> However it does irritate me that it's pregenerating the entire scene in memory. Being allowed to use 300MB of RAM doesn't strike me as very limiting.

<comment><USER40> You wanted optimized code size and optimized performance?

I mean, sure, but think about how big 4KB is, the tricks that are being used to create the scenes are crazy hacks using default Windows sound files and literally anything the executable can reference on the cheap.

Procedural content generation is _really_ expensive (in general), but that's the beauty of it. You find a way to abstract the content into an algorithm, and then you can reduce the size of the assets, but you pretty much always need to pay the price somewhere.

But hey, I understand the sentiment, I wish Slack didn't consume 2 GB of RAM on my machine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> This is actually 4KB (kilobytes). The title lead me to believe it was 4Kb (kilobits). Still impressive though.

</comment><comment><USER42> Back in the day demos were more impressive imo. A lot of them now use direct x or opengl. For the most part the stuff you see isn't written by hand anymore AFAIK, they just have programs to generate the actual demo. Basically they use modeling programs.

<comment><USER43> While true for large demos, the 4kb — perhaps even 64kb? — are still written very much by hand.

<comment><USER42> I hope so. I'm not involved with the scene at all, but I did read a bunch of history about the scene and watched tons of demos.

I think farbrausch was one of the major groups who did this sort of thing [https://github.com/farbrausch/fr_public](https://github.com/farbrausch/fr_public)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Cool idea, too bad it's not free software. It's less free than any software I've seen (explicitly saying that you can't use it for "settings where security is critical" \-- something that doesn't even make sense from a software license perspective). It's like the "Good not Evil" line in the JSON license.

<comment><USER45> Check out how many of your commercial software licenses forbid running them in nuclear power plants.

<comment><USER44> I use free software, so none. :D

<comment><USER46> Alternately, all of them :P</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Am I under attack? - <AUTHOR> So, over the last month, I've received five "welcome to X" emails for relatively prominent online services.
Two of these were gaming related, and included a fairly unique username which I tracked to a redditor who claimed to have no idea what was going on, though they admitted they had an account with one of the gaming services.
It could be coincidence, I suppose, that someone has a similar email and keeps entering it wrong in the same way. It seems unlikely, but otherwise I'm not sure how signing up for services with my email address is an attack vector.
Is there a risk I am missing here? <comment><USER2> Do you have a common name?

I do and have firstname.lastname@example.com. I get all sorts of emails from people with the same name who somehow believe they have my email address.

<comment><USER3> A common issue I've seen is websites treating a period in email addresses differently. All discussion about standards aside, the fact is

* To Gmail, email@example.com and email@example.com are _the same_.

* To a website like Paypal, they are _different_. So it will allow multiple signups with the 'same' email address.

I just had to troubleshoot this for my parents, who have separate Paypal accounts, but tied to the same email account.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If the links to the platform are legitimate, try (carefully) logging to one of them and see if you can get more info on the person who created the account.

Did they leave other information on the platform: Name, number, login history? Are they dummy accounts or are they really used by someone?

It may be an honest mistake.

</comment><comment><USER5> If you clicked on any hyperlink from that email then you can consider yourself to be phished. You do not know what they wanted - was it your google account? Or something else? You don't know, the only way to keep yourself safe is to change all of your passwords.

<comment><AUTHOR> No, I made sure not to click anything, though I did check the raw message to confirm the links were genuine (or at the right domain).

I've got 2FA enabled, and I checked my gmail access history and there are no unusual locations or devices.

It's just very odd to me that this has continued, gradually, over a month.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Maybe these are phishing emails? Just change your password and maybe enable two factor authentication just to be safe.</comment>


FBI Hacker Says Apple Are 'Jerks' and 'Evil Geniuses' for Encrypting iPhones - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/59wkkk/fbi-hacker-says-apple-are-jerks-and-evil-geniuses-for-encrypting-iphones <comment><USER2> _That means, he explained, that "password attempts speed went from 45 passwords a second to one every 18 seconds_

You mean the option on every Unix system I've worked on in the last 25 years? Either supporting a narrative, or this person is awfully wet behind the ears.

 _"At what point is it just trying to one up things and at what point is it to thwart law enforcement? " he added. "Apple is pretty good at evil genius stuff."_

Oh, rest easy, whippersnapper, we are a ways off from that. It's what experts call a "design decision". Keep taunting Apple, though, and they just might start take it personally. And don't flatter yourselves, Apple does this to keep _everyone_ out except the authorized user, not just law enforcement. But I suspect our FBI "expert" knows his.

But oddly when the FBI says "Apple" three times in a whiny voice, an iPhone shows up in my shopping cart instead of an Android phone. My conspiracy theory says the FBI is on the take from Apple, it's the best advertising they have right now.

</comment><comment><USER3> "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

― Upton Sinclair

If I worked for Apple and had any part of this, I'd take his words as a compliment.

<comment><USER4> I think you could use this quote to justify both sides of the debate.

Unlike Google, which generates money from ads, Apple is a hardware company, so data security is both economically viable and integral to their brand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> FBI complaints are the best publicity for iPhone security Apple could wish for.

<comment><USER6> If I were I'd make an ad out of it.

<comment><USER7> It needs an evil cackle or two in it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This guy needs to re-read the 4th amendment. Its supposed to be hard.

</comment><comment><USER9> > "If you have another evil genius, Cellebrite,then maybe we can get into that > front," he said, facetiously coughing as he said "Cellebrite."

Interesting, wonder if Apple will see it as a challenge and make it so that whatever Cellebrite is doing impossible or much, much harder.

</comment><comment><USER10> What I do not understand is what do they think is on a phone? If they have the phone in possession, then it is assumed that it belonged to someone that has been charged.

If their web of evidence relies on a single device their evidence is weak.

</comment><comment><USER11> This comes us every few months.

<comment><USER12> The last previous story was less than a week ago:

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national- security/fbi-c...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/fbi- chief-calls-encryption-a-major-public-safety- issue/2018/01/09/29a04166-f555-11e7-b34a-b85626af34ef_story.html)</comment></comment>


Ghosttown - the missing link from Google Music - <AUTHOR> http://a1.blogspot.com/2011/05/ghosttown-missing-part-from-google.html

<comment><USER2> Rdio is faster and scans and replicates your iTunes library almost instantly. But I hope Rdio isn't bought by google.</comment>


How to Win Hackathons - <AUTHOR> http://markmiyashita.com/blog/how-to-win-a-hackathon/

<comment><USER2> He mentions that biting off more than you can chew is bad, but all the times I've done well at hackathons, we've always felt like we were doing exactly that up until the last hour or two. Then we figured out the hard technological stuff and everything came together.

Crowd pleasers (movement, participation, vision, sound, lights) seem to do really well, generally.

There seem to be two directions you can take: solving a problem or being creative. E.g a scheduling app vs an online game. Sometimes being creative is easier to be flashy with. And as long as it's demonstrably technologically difficult, it can win.

</comment><comment><USER3> Great writeup. I think you hit the nail on the head by identifying several key components of a good hackathon experience. I think you might be asking yourself the wrong question when you go to these events though.

Over the past two years, I've noticed that the ratio of prizes to teams at any given hackathon has been approaching 1:2. All that means is that "winning" in the sense of getting a prize is becoming more and more common. It leaves me wondering if the people who are winning these events now are getting the same amount of benefit as the people who were winning when I first started out. Thus, I think the more important question that people should be asking is "How do I get the best experience out of this event?".

I think your writeup did a great job of nailing exactly how to do that:

1\. Work with a team with a varied skillset

2\. Demoing what you made

3\. Work on something you're passionate about

4\. Keep things succinct and manageable

</comment><comment><USER4> One important aspect is to have a good idea of what the judging committee is looking for. Some hackathons are going to be decided by your polish and presentation. Others are going to be biased towards more technically impressive projects, perhaps with less polish. I've certainly seen both kinds.

Also, I've definitely seen some projects do less well seemingly because the judges didn't realize how impressive they actually were. If you're doing something that's very advanced but correspondingly obscure, you have to be careful to convey that in your presentation!

And, of course, as with any such endeavor, don't be disheartened if you don't win even with a great project. Having something that works at all is great in and of itself, and the judges have to choose from a whole bunch of projects in a very short time, which necessarily means they can't consider any of them too deeply.

</comment><comment><USER5> Learn something and have a good time?</comment>


Show HN: My (late) holiday hack: SOPAOpera.org - <AUTHOR> http://sopaopera.org/

<comment><USER2> NY Senators are paid well. 500k for both NY senators. Crazy.

And Al Franklet is a supporter? Something is wrong here....

<comment><USER3> Franken is one of the co-sponsors of PIPA.

<comment><USER4> He comes out of / is a product of the entertainment industry. What did you expect?

Also, "Hollywood" had long been a... "bastion" of Democratic support. And, of course, the juice flows both ways.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It might be useful to be able to toggle a "Details of next election" overlay, bringing up info on how vulnerable each representative is in his or her next primary and general elections. This would allow people to focus attention on the few representatives who have close races coming up.

My guess is these candidates will be by far the most receptive to public opinion.

Even better would be to include information on challengers and their stance on SOPA as well. That would make it easy to focus attention on ideal candidates: those who are for SOPA and have close races coming up against challengers who are against it. Maybe we can get a couple of them to switch.

Let me know if you think that's a good idea and want help implementing it. My email's in my profile.

<comment><AUTHOR> You read my mind...I had actually thought about that and put it off because...the FEC data is just an annoying unnormalized Excel spreadsheet. It wouldn't be hard to include, I just didn't get to it yet.

<comment><USER5> Another good feature would be a summary of how SOPA currently stands, or a link to a website that has that information and keeps it current.

I love HN, but it is NOT the place to get up to date political info. I believe at one point there were articles saying "SOPA postponed until January" and "SOPA will be voted on before Christmas" up at the same time.

Also, a lot of those representatives have facebook pages. Is it worth SOPA opponents time to go on there and give them a hard time in the comments, or should we stick to phone calls? It might be worth including a link to their FB pages anyway, though I'm not sure on this one.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, that was one of my feature creep ideas too:

<http://sopaopera.org/sopa/>

Unfortunately I decided on an ad-hoc database model for "Events" (when I originally just wanted to record statements by congressmembers) and never quite got reorganized in time. Not too hard to rectify, of course.

In case you're wondering, there is an official place to get this info...the Library of Congress's THOMAS system: <http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi- bin/bdquery/z?d112:HR03261:@@@X>

There's still a lot of space for people who can create the links between entities, though...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Let me take the devil's advocate position:

This new Internet thing is threatening the business models of some of my biggest supporters, as well as aiding illegal activity. A legal remedy would seem to be in order.

Is this a free speech issue? No. People will still have the right to make new websites or post on websites what do not infringe, or go on talk radio or publish newspapers, so they will still have free speech.

A bunch of scofflaws just want free downloads, and websites naturally don't want to be saddled with enforcing things. A legal remedy would seem to be in order.

The question we need to ask ourselves, is how do we reach people who think like this? Once we've done that, then the legislators will have to listen.

</comment><comment><USER7> Nice. Is there a data source for amendments? Is there a way to tag the people who are in the Judiciary committee?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah....that info is actually in there, on the profile...obviously, that's not of much help. I originally envisioned this as showing every active member as once but realized that sending 500 images on every frontpage load would be annoying...So, not all judiciary members will be visible. I guess I could just put them on their own page.

The House committee markup page can be found here: <http://judiciary.house.gov/hearings/mark_12152011.html>

One think I've learned (even more clearly than I knew beforehand) was that our government is not very data-oriented. You can tell from the amendment voting that there are a few people (who I didn't have time to go through and include) who could be classified as opponents because they are voting in a bloc with Issa and the other OPEN act advocates during the amendment process.

However, to programmatically parse that...requires OCR fun: [http://judiciary.house.gov/hearings/pdf/12152011RC3%20-%20Is...](http://judiciary.house.gov/hearings/pdf/12152011RC3%20-%20Issa%20Amdt7.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Suggestion: add sort by state.

<comment><AUTHOR> My bad...that had been in there and I must have deleted it accidentally. Now it's back in. Thanks for pointing that out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's amazing how diverse each side is in terms of democrats vs. republicans considering how partisan every other recent issue has been. What's the dividing line? Education about tech and the internet maybe?

<comment><USER10> _"What's the dividing line?"_

Probably sources of campaign financing, and/or makeup of companies and industries doing business in one's represented state.

This isn't a partisan issue, so much as a "who butters my bread?" issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Great job! Makes it easy to get all of the information in one place.

I just made a call to my representative (whose position was not stated) and the person who answered was "not allowed to comment on it."

</comment><comment><USER12> Nice holiday hack! Are you planning to keep it up-to-date? I would like to visit it every now and then to track updates along side other sites I have been checking for SOPA related stuff

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes...the low hanging fruit has mostly been collected. The fact of the matter, from what I can tell, is that on any given issue, most representatives won't say what their position is because they don't _have to_...there are very few legislators like Ron Paul who are just going to just say whatever they think when put on the spot.

So, other than the official co-sponsors, to determine someone's position, I just extrapolated from any historical information. For example, anyone who was on the judiciary committee who approved of PROTECT-IP's precursor (COICA in 2010) is likely, as far as we can know, a supporter of PROTECT-IP too.

I don't think such judgments of position can be made on campaign donations alone though. So it's an interesting challenge to think of ways to discern how engaged a Congressmember is on an issue based on the less publicized interactions he/she may have. Hopefully there's an easy way to collect such information that doesn't involve being a full-time researcher...but I plan to collect what I can and update for the time being.

<comment><USER12> Thanks sounds like you have a good plan... Amazing that officials can keep quiet on issues until they vote... I think your approach can at least provide hints and motivate people to call and get direct answers

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Nitpick: for some reason everyone's chin is cut off. This is in Opera and Chrome. Otherwise looks really cool!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I got a little aggressive in my background-position setting (fixed it a bit). The problem is that some portraits are close ups, and others are two- thirds body...hard to get chins in the former without cutting off heads in the latter :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> What's most surprising here is that these lawmakers are being bought off for so little, especially when you consider how much money the backers of these special interest groups have, and even more so when you consider how much financial damage these laws will cause to the average Joe and Jane Internet.</comment>


Yes, You Can Make Office Politics Less Toxic (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://hbr.org/2017/11/yes-you-can-make-office-politics-less-toxic <comment><USER2> Interesting ideas, but ones that require the person acting to have the authority and security to do so without fear of repercussion. Some of these tactics would not be advisable for someone trying to manage up.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you handle Excel import/exports in your apps - <AUTHOR> Hi folks!
I'm implementing Excel-related functionality for at least 4th project in my career. As usual, an ability to save the data set into an XLSX file in a custom format and the way to ingest the data back, using the same data format, or ideally letting the customer map their own formats into our format.
What worries me is that I need to take care about all the hassle around - handling large uploads, managing timeouts, reporting the progress, caring about basics of data validation, file encodings, ensuring the import process doesn't take up all the server resources etc.
The list of impediments for such a "side" feature is unproportionally large, IMO. There are few libraries for almost every stack, but they still require me to handle at least half of these impediments by my own (resources, server config etc.).
I'm wondering, how do you usually handle these stuff? Do we all go through these problems over and over again or are there solutions that I'm not aware of that makes things easier, like a standalone tool or service I can "just use"?
If not, my maker soul asks: maybe there should be one? Maybe I should build one? Would you consider using this kind of service in your applications if one exists? Why not? <comment><USER2> Been there done that.

Tips (apply common sense based on your specific company):

1\. As an engineer, learn to say no. Want to import some random excel sheet into our system? Sorry no you can not.

2\. Try to provide an API instead and push the problem to the customer. If they want it badly enough they can pay someone to write something that takes their stuff and imports it via your API.

3\. If you have to do the file thing avoid XLSX like the plague. Stick to CSV. It's their problem to convert their XLSX or anything else to CSV.

4\. CHOOSE, VALIDATE AND ENFORCE the format (or a few possible formats). Do not negotiate or collaborate with customers about "custom format" and so on. That is a never ending battle you will never win. You give 1 inch they take 10. Eventually they will give an animated gif compressed in a zip file, wrapped in a tarball and ask you to convert that to CSV and import it in.

5\. If you are running a typical SaaS don't turn your product into free in- house IT consulting for the random customers. Make the capability possible within the system by exposing an API and leave the rest for them to figure out. If they care about enough they will have to pay someone to create the integrations. 95% don't care and will give up and adapt.

If you have enterprise customers paying 6-7 figure sums it's a different story...

<comment><USER3> Expose the api and offer consulting to work with them, min 40 hours st $200 hour for example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Sounds like you're talking about two separate things, the upload part and the import part. The upload part is solved for most languages and frameworks. The import step; excel parsing solved, getting data into the correct format is highly app specific. Maybe you could clarify what you have in mind?

</comment><comment><USER4> SheetJs [0]

[0]: [http://sheetjs.com/](http://sheetjs.com/)

free as beer, voila !

</comment><comment><USER5> > If not, my maker soul asks: maybe there should be one? Maybe I should build > one? Would you consider using this kind of service in your applications if > one exists? Why not?

To answer your "maybe there should be one?" question. What you're describing sounds like this: [https://flatfile.io/](https://flatfile.io/). It was shared here 2 months ago.

Though to answer your original question:

> How do you handle Excel import/exports in your apps

One way we go about that is: whenever someone uploads a file, create some sort of UploadRequest record which contains the filepath in S3/Azure/GCS/etc. Then the actual parsing and validation is spun off in a worker process. That way the web process isn't locked and we can pub progress ((processed_rows/row_count).percentage) on authorized subs. If that worker process ends, update the UploadRequest record status and dump the array of good_rows/error_rows in some column for that record. Users see that the status for that UploadRequest is updated, then they can review the UploadRequest errors. If there are errors, they download the uploaded file, fix that and re- upload again. At the start you can also provide a template to "gate" your upload, if it doesn't match your template you blow up UploadRequest with the proper error. If all is good, they click "Process" or something, which actually inserts the rows or does whatever.

Again, that's just one way.

If bizdev asks to make a feature that allows fixing those rows in your app without leaving the browser, we find that it slowly feature creeps into Google Sheets territory, which is a BIG undertaking and a separate feature on it's own. It's a nice experience to do in-app editing but we try to see if most of our Excel uploaders would prefer to go back to Excel for editing. Sometimes we find that they'll prefer going back to Excel because they'll use the same excel sheet for other purposes in their process (send that Excel as an email to another department, use that and aggregate it as a separate report, etc.).

But really, the hardest part in Excel uploads isn't server resources, progress, file encoding, or timeouts, it's the validation. There are different levels of validation: from presence checks, formatting, type-checking to running a row or a cell against business logic, 3rd-party API calls or records in your database. This is where most User errors arise, because you'd have to educate them on what values to put if you're referencing something in your business logic (special abbreviated codes, special combination of codes, date formats, etc.).

<comment><USER6> Small question, since the developer docs are not available on mobile devices:

When the flatfile.io homepage keeps referring to "XLS" docs, is it actually trying to say they will import modern Excel files ("XLSX") or does it literally mean you would have to ask users to re-save their spreadsheets into the ancient format?</comment></comment>


The Power of Good UI Design - <AUTHOR> http://phillryu.com/2007/07/21/the-power-of-good-ui-design/

<comment><USER2> Babies are extremely fast learners. This particular one might have had a prior exposition to the interface, so I'm not really impressed. If you left your shiny iPhone with the baby for couple hour and next thing you would see was "Buy a new toy" in your Todo list... now that would be pretty cool.

</comment><comment><USER3> My 3.5 year old daughter figured out how to zoom in and out with the pinching motion :)

</comment><comment><USER4> Apple's next ad campaign?</comment>


When writing blog post titles, forget about SEO - <AUTHOR> http://stritar.net/Post/Note-to-self-when-writing-blog-post-titles-forget-about-SEO.aspx

<comment><USER2> "Search engine rankings are influenced mostly by (social media) backlinks."

Hilarious.

Also - cramming a keyword you want into a title tag that doesn't fit the content is shitty SEO. There's a difference between that, and doing it well.

<comment><USER3> Completely agree with you. If this post had a downvote button I would surely use it. Very very bad advice in his post that is just flat out wrong.

<comment><USER4> Despite dispensing SEO advice so freely, the site's current SEM Rush daily traffic is 0 visitors / day. And the author's been blogging on this site for over 3 years; it's not a new site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm sorry but you have a few details wrong in this post.

If you're concerned about referencing keywords, you could do it in body copy as opposed to the post title.

Also, rankings are largely influenced by the number of sites linking to a post, alongside on-page keyword references, well-built sites and user experience. Social signals are just a catalyst - not a direct factor.

<comment><USER6> I'm sorry, you clearly don't know what you're talking about. Stay current with what is going on, SEOMOZ and SearchEngineLand are good sources.

And btw, the core message in his post is very good one. Lots of people are convinced they need to optimize their titles to death for greater SEO success. Tools like Yoast's SEO plugin for WordPress and WP Scribe encourage that kind of boxed idea of SEO. Especially newcomers just get confused by this. If you create content people want to read and share, they will increase the ranking factors of your page. It starts with a good title. I'd say the social factor is a direct a factor can get when it comes to raising search engine visibility.

<comment><USER7> What about the parent comment indicates that he doesn't know what he's talking about?

Here are some Matt Cutts quotes from two weeks ago:

"Over time, Google will care more about identity and social reputation."

"Links still have many, many good years ahead of them."

"We like standards that are available on the open web. If we're not able to crawl something – like Facebook or like the time we temporarily ran into problems with Twitter – we don't want to depend on that data."

It's pretty obvious that Google is taking a very slow approach to mixing in social signals. They want Google+ to be THE social signal, and that isn't close to happening yet. Social can be a great way to build links, but calling I definitely would not call it a direct factor at this point.

<comment><USER6> Links are important, naturally. When they are coming organically as a direct result of social engagement, even better. You're more likely to get social engagement if you don't compromise the human readable title and content for the sake of SEO.

But quotes like these >> rankings are largely influenced by the number of sites linking to a post are very inaccurate and wouldn't come from someone who is keeping up to date with SEO. You can have tens of thousands of links and it could actually be hurting your SEO, which is why some sites are scrambling to take down links just to recover.

It's also worth noting that you can go crazy with on-page factors, having the perfect post slug, the right keyword density, keyword rich anchor text, descriptive meta descriptions, no-follow links, a limited amount of links on the page etc and it can end up biting you in the butt: overoptimizing can hurt your google rankings. The message coming from Google is pretty clear: create high quality content and make it accessible, don't get too clever with SEO. They will only get better at incorporating social signals into their rankings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> >> _it's every blogger's dream his / her work will once be self-sustainable. Traffic without active (social media) involvement. I do the writing, Google does its magic, the readers to the rest._

Weird writing/typos aside, I find this concept confusing. What does it mean for writing to be self-sustainable?

</comment><comment><USER9> Site struggling. Cached version:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:stritar...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:stritar.net%2FPost%2FNote- to-self-when-writing-blog-post-titles-forget-about-SEO.aspx)

</comment><comment><USER10> >> _" But I've chosen the wrong title for it, since the core of every UX analysis are the problems and goals each solution is trying to solve and achieve. By thinking about SEO, I've devalued the content of the story by presenting it as something it is not."_

So the OP is not saying ditch SEO in favor of verbosity/cleverly-punny-vague titles, he's saying, don't write blog titles full of bullshit buzzwords.

Thanks for the insight.</comment>


Spacex drops propulsive landing for Dragon capsules - <AUTHOR> https://spaceflightnow.com/2017/07/19/propulsive-landings-nixed-from-spacexs-dragon-spaceship/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is disappointing. I was really hoping the idea of landing the Dragon propusively would survive, especially as I was hoping there would be a way to integrate it with a lunar lander. But apparently that won't be the case.</comment>


Patent awarded for non-fueled energy charging system - <AUTHOR> http://grandblancview.mihomepaper.com/news/2018-05-24/News/Local_men_hope_to_market_nonfueled_energy_charging.html <comment><AUTHOR> Saw this in my local newspaper and the invention seems majorly disruptive, although I don't think these guys are getting much attention with a little local article written about them. I am posting it here hoping someone with the right background can reach out to them.

<comment><USER2> Don't hold your breath. This smells very bad.

The article has no information about how the system works, and they didn't show a prototype. They only claim to have one that worked for 27 hours, but it's not clear how much power it was providing and they have no independent verification.

I'm trying to guess, but since one of them has a background in pneumatics, perhaps they are storing energy compressed air.(?????) They say something about magnets, but I don't have any idea how they could possible use magnets, so I count it as a red flag. Namedroping Tesla is another red flag.

I tried some googling, but I didn't find anything. If you get a better press coverage, or a link to the patent, or something more technical perhaps I can give it a try.</comment></comment>


Human or Machine? Make your guess quickly - <AUTHOR> https://g3.prhlt.upv.es/guessit/ <comment><AUTHOR> We are conducting an online survey for research purposes. Some of the scribbles that you'll see were generated by humans; but others were generated by a machine.

The test can be completed in less than a minute, at the end of which you'll see your score. So, how well did you perform?</comment>


Glasnost: Test whether your ISP is traffic shaping - <AUTHOR> http://www.measurementlab.net/tools/glasnost <comment><USER2> Sorry. You lost me at _Install Java app._

<comment><USER3> Java applet, but yeah, same here, not gonna happen.

It's not that I don't trust the source. It's that I don't trust Java. Had they done this as a browser plugin, python script or whatever, that'd be totally fine.</comment></comment>


Code Red: Organizing the Tech Sector - <AUTHOR> https://nplusonemag.com/issue-31/politics/code-red/ <comment><USER2> Great piece. Would love to see more discussion of it on HN. I hope you reach justice with the NLRB for your case.</comment>


Quick Intro to the Crypto Fundamental Analysis - <AUTHOR> https://blog.alpaca.markets/blog/2018/5/22/so-you-want-to-trade-crypto-fundamentals-part1 <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN! We are writing a mini-series looking into (1) the nature of Cryptocurrency trading and investment, (2) the key factors which shift the markets, and (3) the important differences between Crypto and more traditional traded assets. This is the Part 1 of 6 posts. Love to hear your feedback!!</comment>


What is the "two-drive trick" that can read Amiga disks on a PC? - <AUTHOR> https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/12747/what-is-the-two-drive-trick-that-can-read-amiga-disks-on-a-pc <comment><AUTHOR> Maybe I am a bit sentimental here but I found the low-level tinkering I did with computers during school much more interesting than the high-level things I learned to do later. Things like toggling the keyboards LEDs for the very first time felt just great. That reminds me how easy (QBasic!) it was to get started with it. I think it was the lack of abstraction and the verbosity and _' speaking'_ names of some statements ( _select case_ , _goto_ ) that made it so accessible for someone with no teacher and without any prior experience with programming. Even _goto_ s themselves might have helped on that journey as they made the control flow much more comprehensible. Stuff happens in your program and _IF_ you want it to happen again _THEN_ _GOTO_ the beginning. That it worked out of the box and didn't require any setup might have contributed as well.

<comment><USER2> I miss having low-level access to video memory.

I've kinda wanted to experiment with graphics in a way that would require me to calculate individual pixels, but AFAIK, unless you use pixel shaders, it is ungodly slow.

Used to be that you could color a pixel blue with a single MOV instruction. Now, you either use a graphics API that has a SetPixel function (Which is incredibly slow for drawing full-screen graphics), or create a byte-array of some sort that gets translated, which while faster, still isn't fast enough.

<comment><USER3> You have ample room to define the hardware you want to see, though. [0] Setting bytes in a buffer isn't some ultimate graphics abstraction: it's just one way to express it at a low level, and only capable of drawing anything of interest in the sense that a Turing Machine can compute anything that can be expressed digitally. You're gonna crave higher level concepts really quickly. And going higher level does come with its own limits, but that's always been the case. Every sufficiently complex production graphics renderer will eventually develop some kind of hybrid approach to the data representation while achieving the necessary flexibility: Simply define line segment drawing, and boom, suddenly you have a vector-to-raster pipeline. Or, maybe you have a sprite all laid out perfectly for fast memory copies. But then you have to clip it against the screen bounds, add a mask so that it can overdraw, and so on...and so you end up carrying geometry and color data around too. And if you desire to do something fancy like scale and rotate it, you will probably define it not in terms of bytes but in terms of linear algebra, so now you have a requirement for some matrix math.

And the only way in which we're more limited is when we start talking about distributing the work, creating products. Then we start saying, "well, that API doesn't let me dip into the hardware to create the abstraction I need." But that's because we moved the goalposts from "it can run on a computer" to "it can run on many people's computers, in many different contexts." And back in the day that really was never a guaranteed thing. There were stark differences between platforms, and many ports amounted to remakes.

So, then, does it matter? Does "minimalism" in programming even functionally exist, given our unsatiable appetite for dependencies?

[0] [https://prog21.dadgum.com/66.html](https://prog21.dadgum.com/66.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> That's a really cool hack, I wonder if it would work on 82077AA or compatibles? I might give that a try later this month after I resurrect my A500

Presumably it should be possible to create a simple drive emulator to spit out that sector/track header without needing an actual disk. Not sure if I'm smart enough to tackle that but it's worth a try!

I'm already working on a 6502 System at the moment that has an 82077AA compatible FDC and can read PC Formatted floppies so it should be relatively easy for me to tool around with this hack.

<comment><USER5> There are now quite a few floppy emulators of all kinds of flavors.

One: [https://github.com/keirf/FlashFloppy](https://github.com/keirf/FlashFloppy)

<comment><USER4> Yeah, I've got a gotek for my A500 but I like to take on stupid useless projects, like a uC that does nothing except spit out sector headers lol

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I used this trick to back up my 5000 disk Amiga collection in the 90s. Bought a few extra floppy drives for $10 each at the local flea market :)

<comment><USER7> According to the writeup this trick was invented in December 1999, was it known before?

<comment><USER6> It was definitely before 1997, because that's when I moved to Japan.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Very clever. Presumably this would be unable to read high density (1.76MB) Amiga disks.

<comment><USER7> Commodore never upgraded Paula chip (knowing that company they probably immediately fired designer and didnt keep documentation to the chip), every model got the same 1985 state of the art Double Density floppy controller all the way to 1994 bankruptcy. As LIV2 already mentioned even their top of the line $3.5k A4000 Workstation shipped with gimped Floppy subsystem.

<comment><USER8> The floppy drive could read/write high density 1.76MB disks. I know, I had one. You're right that the Paula chip wasn't upgraded to handle double the data rate from the drive. The solution instead was that the disk span at half the speed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Suppose someone still had a box or two of old Amiga floppies but no old hardware - what is the easiest way in 2019 to turn them into .adfs?

<comment><USER10> Not the easiest way, but interesting. [http://amiga.robsmithdev.co.uk/history](http://amiga.robsmithdev.co.uk/history)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Life, Uh, Finds a Way.gif</comment>


Show HN: Find recommendations from good people - <AUTHOR> http://abyjames.com/projects/recommendations/ <comment><USER2> I always find that recommendation websites suffer in the long-term because the incentive to just keep adding more stuff (to keep the site not seem stagnant, thus make people come back) is greater than the incentive to strictly filter only super high quality things. How is this site going to tackle that problem?

<comment><USER3> I dont use any single recommendation source anymore for this reason. Its always a combination od youtube, amazon recommendations and reviews, reddit, and stackexchange sites.

<comment><USER4> Great idea. Crowdsourcing is good but averaging out crowdsources of crowdsources is a better way to understand the general sentiment of the population.

<comment><USER5> I think the problem is that you don't actually want the general sentiment of the population: it most likely leads to things you'll accept, but not actually want (ie movies you're lukewarm on).

I think what recsys really should be trying to target is finding the group most similar to your tastes, and then picking based on the _outliers_ of that group. The goal being to find something within your tastes, but far enough from your normal to be _interesting_

Recommending based on _star personalities_ preferences, is I think, a way of approaching this idea: why would you want to know what the average item is? You want the best one.

<comment><AUTHOR> This.

I'll be sourcing recommendations from the silent majority of experts as well ([https://prog21.dadgum.com/143.html](https://prog21.dadgum.com/143.html)).

Reference: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17784551](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17784551).

<comment><USER6> There is one area that I can think of, where the recommendation of _some_ 'experts' can very useful: medicine. It is extremely difficult to find a competent physician. Medicine as is generally practiced is often about drastic procedures like surgery, pills etc. which worsens the overall condition of the patient and often results in huge bills. There are various contributing factors, some of which are not in the physician's control - but the end result is always the same - a really bad deal for the patient. 'Silent' recommendations can often lead to some renegade physicians who are great at treating people but may be at odds with the physician's board. All what I said hold true for dentists also: the truly good ones are very few.

<comment><AUTHOR> Medicine is a tricky area (it is close to religion in this aspect).

<comment><USER6> Well, agreed...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A few ideas:

\- Link the name to a list with all the recommendations by that person, use the date for a link to the place where the recommendation was made (using the date for a permalink is convention).

\- Link tags.

\- Show everyone who recommended something and sort by how many people recommended it. (For instance The Pragmatic Programmer is recommended by Joel Spolsky, Steve Yegge and Jeff Atwood.)

\- Use Amazon Affiliate links to make money.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. I'm building one useful feature a time.

No to amazon affiliates.

<comment><USER8> > No to amazon affiliates.

Thanks you! This shows character and actual, proper altruistic intentions.

Before reading this, I was not even going to click the link.

<comment><USER9> Personally, I prefer not to use any project that has no way to make money. Life is expensive and time consuming. Projects require at least a little time and money. If that isn't reimbursed in any way, the rest of life will nearly always take precedent at some point. Affiliate links seem like a good way to solve this. I don't see where the conflict of interest lies.

<comment><AUTHOR> I want myself and others to contribute because of the desire to contribute. I don't want to bring affiliates into the equation lest it brings the _wrong_ incentives (however glimmering it may be).

There are other ways to make money.

<comment><USER9> I'm honestly curious how you envision that affiliate links might create the wrong incentives. There are other ways to make money, but the ones I can think of seem much worse. Advertising sucks and clearly has more wrong incentive problems. Donations are less predictable and disconnected from the usefulness of the site. It seems to me that getting a small cut of "hey this book does look useful, I think I'll buy it!" is as well-aligned as it gets. But I'm interested in your thoughts on this!

<comment><AUTHOR> Ads don't suck. Bad ads suck. I love good ads.

I used to _wait_ for ads to appear on my Garena client back in the days when I played DOTA because they were so cool (and useful).

If I know my audience, I don't have to compromise privacy to show useful ads clean and neat either (watertight curation is applied here as well).

Good ads are relevant.

On amazon affiliates:

The iron rule of nature is: You get what you reward for. If you want ants to come, you put sugar on the floor — Charlie Munger

I don't want to reward the wrong type of behavior.

<comment><USER9> I don't get your point about affiliate links _at all_. What better ad is there than a link to a recommended book itself? I'd much rather see you get a small portion of the purchase price of a book you recommended to me than look at your ads, curated or not.

But it's your site! I hope you do find success with the ad strategy, your site seems useful, and I hope it remains worth your time.

<comment><AUTHOR> This comment puts it well: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17789161](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17789161).

<comment><USER9> You have the same incentive to prioritize ads over recommendations. If I trust you to keep ads clearly separated, I also trust you to keep recommendations undiluted.

<comment><AUTHOR> > You have the same incentive to prioritize ads over recommendations.

No.

> If I trust you to keep ads clearly separated, I also trust you to keep > recommendations undiluted.

True. I am the one curator at the moment. I'll open this so that others can curate / recommend. I require that dilution of intention doesn't happen then. DNA is important.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I truly hope it works out well for you. My personal response:

* I don't know what is meant by "good" people; I'd choose a different term.

* My impression is recommendations from "famous" people, which don't interest me personally. Famous people aren't necessarily smart and unless a topic is in their specific domain, they have no more to contribute that the average person. (Personally, I find the idolization of famous people as 'smarter than thou' to be disturbing and unhealthy; they are no better than gits1225 and I'd like to see their recommendations too.)

* I would be very interested in seriously thought out recommendations by experts in their domains. For example, for a desk chair, I'd be interested in an anonymous chair designer's recommendation. For a history book, I'd be interested in an historian's recommendation. I'm not any more interested in a famous coder's recommendation for a chair or a history book than I am in any other coder's recommendation. (To be fair, some of the famous people are experts making recommendations in their domains.)

<comment><AUTHOR> All valid points which I too am pondering on but don't have clear answers.

I checked your profile but couldn't find an email to contact you. I'd love to discuss details once I have written down my thoughts.

<comment><USER11> Maybe there would be a chance these experts would answer an email, some of them at least.. the problem would be, of course, to identify them.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree. The hack I'm using is PeopleRank (check my comment above).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for checking my project. Glad HNers loved it. I had a great day.

Thanks to Alexander and Michiel for pointing me to Knuth's and Keith's recommendations.

I'm signing off for today. I'll reply to new comments (if any) tomorrow.

Have a great day : )

</comment><comment><USER12> I suggest adding zebra striping to the list. It's hard to follow some of the short titles over to the names.

<comment><AUTHOR> I see. Hmm. Thanks for the feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Great idea. Could you make the links to Amazon referrals so you can make some cash at the same time? [https://affiliate- program.amazon.com/help/node/topic/2021023...](https://affiliate- program.amazon.com/help/node/topic/202102380)

<comment><AUTHOR> I appreciate the tip and I did consider it, but chose not to.

<comment><USER14> In that case maybe make them smile.amazon.com links so some proceeds go to charity?

<comment><AUTHOR> That is a lovely idea. Let me sit on the suggestion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm not exactly sure how it'd be implemented with the current design, but I'd think it'd be useful to have a query in the URL so you could link [http://abyjames.com/projects/recommendations?query=Books](http://abyjames.com/projects/recommendations?query=Books) to just show books, rather than pointing someone to [http://abyjames.com/projects/recommendations](http://abyjames.com/projects/recommendations) and asking them to type in "Books".

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea. I built the basic idea. I'll be building features one by one. Thanks for the feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> \- Someone compiled a list called "Andreessen's Favorite Books": [https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mmEKySwi0iYjWx_DoigL...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mmEKySwi0iYjWx_DoigL4y7_NflsT0bB0ZnibBFqSVs/edit#gid=0)

\- I compiled a list (see comment on video) from a trailer video for John Doerr's "Measure What Matters": [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aW5gdRRn_U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aW5gdRRn_U)

<comment><AUTHOR> I was going to add Andreessen's recommendations this week. This helps!

Thanks for pulling the book recommendations. I'll add 'em this week as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Might I suggest not using the urls for search? Searching for "Software" gives you a ton of Joel Spolsky recommendations because of his website URL ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea. This is a wart. I'll be fixing it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Love this idea. I've thought about doing something similar, but as a graph, so we could see books that many people have recommended in common.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm working on it. Would love to get feedback once I build the feature. I checked your profile but couldn't find an email to contact you.

<comment><USER18> Awesome, thanks! email@example.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Email saved. Thanks.

Hack: You can search for a book (The Mythical Man-Month) and see who all recommended it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Thanks so much for implementing this idea. Very nice idea. Whenever i want to watch a movie its hard to find whats best with imdb or google search because its so generalized. But if a movie is liked by John Carmack, Michael Nielsen, Steve Yegee or Elon Musk then the chance of me liking is really great.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's the idea. Glad you liked it : )

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Nice!

I have a request though - could you make it more obvious that clicking on the name of the recommender takes you to their review/the context of why they recommended the item?

That wasn't obvious to me at all, but it's often really useful to understand _why_ the person recommended the item in the first place, and what you should expect to get out of it...

Thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> I made it obvious. Let me know if this is clear: [http://abyjames.com/projects/recommendations/](http://abyjames.com/projects/recommendations/).

<comment><USER20> Thanks! Much better, but you might want to display it a bit differently to avoid having the word `source` repeated constantly...

My suggestion would be to replace `source` (apart from the title) with some kind of icon for example.

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmm. Yea. Thanks for the feedback.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Love this, cheers!

For some reason, the design of this is very sweetly nostalgic to me--reminds me of the web from 10y ago (in a good way!).

Web fonts and accessibility concerns with small font size have made good ol 13px Helvetica with blue links on white bg rare.

<comment><AUTHOR> The design is deliberate. I love the old web too : )

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> One suggestion: \- Order by column (especially by date for tech).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. It is on my to build list. Bumped it up : )

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Love the site. I see the "Recommendation" header center-aligned, while all other headers are left-aligned. It looks odd to me, was this intentional?

<comment><AUTHOR> It is. Left aligning that header makes it look weirder. This _looks_ better (IMO).

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> When I searched for 'Software', all of Joel Spolsky's recommendations showed up because the word 'Software' is in his source URL.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea. This is a wart. I'll be fixing it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> One tiny suggestion (well, medium-sized :)

Often, these recommendations come with a reason _why_ this is a good book. You might want to include them, if possible.

<comment><AUTHOR> It is (but I see it is not obvious). Click on the person's name.

I changed the header name from person to source. Does that make it obvious?

<comment><USER25> Somewhat more. Maybe change it to "Source article" so people know there's actual text behind that?

Clicking on a name, I'd expect either a bio, or a list of things they recommended. It didn't occur to me it might be the original recommendation. (But then, it might just be lack of coffee :)

Either way, thank you for building this and collecting the data!

<comment><AUTHOR> I made it obvious. Let me know if this is clear: [http://abyjames.com/projects/recommendations/](http://abyjames.com/projects/recommendations/).

<comment><USER25> Awesome, thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is a great start!

How do you account for duplicates? i.e. Seveneves

The idea (posted elsewhere in this forum) of linking them to smile.amazon.com might be a great suggestion.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is a feature (in my book). Search for The Mythical Man-Month tells me that the book is recommended by Marc Benioff, Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood. That is valuable information for me and tells me that I should read the book as soon as possible : )

I agree on smile.amazon.com.

<comment><USER27> > That is a feature

Agreed

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I miss filter by category (I have tons of books on TODO list already and I wanted to quickly check everything beside books).

<comment><AUTHOR> You can search in tags (example: Philosophy, Book), but it doesn't do what you are looking for.

Thanks for the feedback. I'll look into it.

<comment><USER29> Also put a drop down menu because I don't know if my query in the search box is going to exist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> really cool, i especially like the product (ie non-book) recommendations. having a curated list of products isnt something i'd seen before, while there are plenty of reading lists. your book list is really great but for me i was most pleasantly surprised seeing the non-books

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you found it useful : )

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Great idea! How do you collect data?

<comment><AUTHOR> This data is from my bookmarks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> First thought was to search for Billy G, but it seems you haven't included him yet.

<comment><AUTHOR> These recommendations are from people I follow, and I'll be gradually adding people one recommendation a time.

I couldn't find relevant information on Google for Billy G. Do you mind sharing his profile?

<comment><USER32> It's Bill Gates

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah! I follow his book recommendations and I'll be adding them this month.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This is a great idea. I recommend using ArangoDB ( graph database ) to store the data. You can then support interesting features very easily.

</comment><comment><USER34> Is there a way that the PageRank algorithm could be applied here?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm gonna use a different hack: PeopleRank. Example: If Paul Graham recommends a person, then I'll add all their recommendations.

It is 1 or 0 : )

<comment><USER34> You get one of those two scores for scalability.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Really cool. How long did this take to build?

<comment><AUTHOR> 1 night to build. 1 week to curate content.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Great. I've been working on something similar but in Arabic. Thank you for this list.

<comment><USER37> Care to share your work?

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Nice, here goes my weekend.

<comment><AUTHOR> I recommend Norvig's recommendations : )

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Thanks, very useful!

<comment><AUTHOR> You are welcome : )

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> not enough fiction recommendations :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha. True. That should change once I add recommendations from people from different backgrounds. Maria Popova is not going to recommend The Mythical Man-Month : )</comment></comment>


Safari for Windows market share triples following SW Update push - <AUTHOR> http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/08/05/01/safari_for_windows_market_share_triples_following_sw_update_push.html

<comment><USER2> the download of the safari is 3 times more but that doesn't mean the usage is 3 times more as well ... there are many dumb users who dont even know that safari exist on their machine ... market share is not correctly defined in the article ... if the person is not using the safari then you cant count him to calc market share. Having an option and using that option is 2 different thing.</comment>


Microsoft changes privacy policy to defer to law enforcement - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_on_the_issues/archive/2014/03/28/we-re-listening-additional-steps-to-protect-your-privacy.aspx <comment><USER2> Very good, very responsible move on their part. Hopefully, the other tech giants will follow their lead and update their own policies.

<comment><USER3> Responsible? Mayhaps. But the issue is that this move was required and the incident happened in the first place...

<comment><USER4> So you mean, being wrong is unforgiveable, and admitting your wrong and taking corrective action is meaningless?

<comment><USER3> No. Being wrong is not unforgivable, and the steps they have taken to remedy this issue are "good" ones.

What I'm peeved about is that they dared to violate their users' privacy in such an extensive way in the first place... and that there are no consequences from doing that.

<comment><USER4> There were plenty of consequences for doing that, and hence the new policy. Do you think Microsoft just did this for whimsical reasons?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is one of those times it's nice that the HN editors force headlines to match the original content. I hope they do this one soon.

Original HN headline: Microsoft changes privacy policy to defer to law enforcement

What MS actually said they'd do is refer the matter to law enforcement rather than investigate it themselves. This is a good thing because criminal investigations come with all sorts of protections for citizen rights and privacy.

If it's just MS doing their own investigation, they can do whatever the want. It's a black box with no accountability.

<comment><USER6> >Original HN headline: Microsoft changes privacy policy to defer to law enforcement

>What MS actually said they'd do is refer the matter to law enforcement rather than investigate it themselves. This is a good thing because criminal investigations come with all sorts of protections for citizen rights and privacy.

Isn't what the headline says? The link's original headline "We're listening: Additional steps to protect your privacy" is much worse:

Who's listening? technet.com may not obviously be Microsoft

What are the additional steps? Actually it seems like it's only one step: to refer the case to law enforcement, or in other words to defer to law enforcement

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Having read that Microsoft had changed their privacy policy to _deter_ law enforcement, I can't help but to be disappointed =/</comment>


Unicorn + Bluepill + Nginx - <AUTHOR> http://blog.halftoneapp.com/unicorn-bluepill-nginx/

<comment><USER2> Why is proxying Unicorn to Nginx preferable to using Nginx directly with Passenger?

<comment><USER3> In my experience with both Passenger/nginx and Unicorn/nginx, Unicorn is much more under control with the number of processes it spawns. Passenger may have fixed this by now, but when I was testing, Passenger would forget about processes and spin up new ones. Eventually, you'd run out of memory and Bad Things would ensue.

Unicorn has _never_ done that to me. For production use, that makes the decision really easy

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was hoping it was about Joanna Rutkowska :(</comment>


The Top Free-to-Play Monetization Tricks - <AUTHOR> http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RaminShokrizade/20130626/194933/?

<comment><USER3> These "techniques" are incredibly frustrating to discover for all the gamers who are not likely to fall into these traps. Granted, those are the ones being actively filtered out of the user base for the most part, be it through choice of subject matter or game mechanics - but since these things have become so widespread I became wary of trying out new games in the App Store in general.

The last time I made an in-app purchase was for Elder Sign: Omens, a very simple game of chance that I like primarily because it reminds me so much of the fun I had playing the Arkham Asylum board game. Anyway, they offer a straight deal: a fixed sum (no intermediate currency) for additional content. That's it and I feel comfortable and justified buying that even though it's not a challenging or elaborate game.

I would never buy stuff if a game uses any of the shady tricks described in the article, but what's really poisoning the pool for all game developers is my increasing unwillingness to invest time into games that I don't already know in order to avoid that sort of disappointment. So what they're really doing is ruining it for everyone in the long run.

Maybe straight-up, no-tricks games should have a seal or something ;)

<comment><USER4> That sounds more like DLC than pay to win. I'm totally okay with it in games. There's a number of games (the most notable is GTA IV in my eyes) that have DLC content that adds a LOT of extra time and fun to the game.

But it can be done wrong to. That's the reason I won't buy BF4. They are intent on releasing DLC _before the game_. That's just shady and it doesn't add anything to the game.

<comment><USER5> This is done trickingly in recent games via DLC. The DLC will give some "boosts" like an item that is a bit more powerful than anything you can get early on. It won't tip the end-game but it will tip the early game. Just better enough to make you spend an extra 5 bucks on your 60 dollar purchase.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This whole 'pay-to-win' thing has made the free to play games go downhill in quality so much in the app store. I don't download free games anymore because I know the majority of them will bombard me with push notifications and 'incentives' to get me to cough up £19.99 for some magic keys.

Here's a novel idea: Charge me £4.99 for the game and let me play it. I _don 't mind_ paying for a decent quality game. I would rather pay for a game than download a free one that's unplayable without a tonne of in app purchases.

<comment><USER6> Unfortunately, most people do mind. That's why this stuff is so rampant. As the article says, when it comes down to paying, people will see £4.99 listed as a price and decide "nah, I have this other game I tried that I can still pay". No sale. However if the price says 'free', people click the install button and think "I'll give this a try later".

Basically, you are still in the minority, and most people do not shell out £4.99 for a phone game. They do, however, shell out 5 crystals for an extra rope so that they can "just beat this stage already"!

It's terrible and preys on human failings. The people who are most likely to fall for this are the people who are least likely to be able to afford to pay the rent. The free escape into a world where they can have positive reinforcement from daily troubles is now giving them negative reinforcement until they pay up. Capitalism is fairly cruel.

<comment><USER4> It really is a shame and it's a symptom of the whole 'race to the bottom' that goes on in the app store. In a way, I see _why_ people put these practices in place. You can't charge over a certain amount (as you said) without bombing in sales. In reality some of these games need a lot of work to get the out the door. I'm aware of a few app store games that took months of a full studio's time to release. Yet still, people see it's over £0.69 and say 'Nah, that little game isn't worth it.'

<comment><USER7> It's because the app store is an extraordinarily poor discovery mechanism for games if they aren't free - people won't pay for something they can't tell if they will enjoy, and app stores simply don't provide enough information to answer that question.

<comment><USER8> The app stores are extremely poor discovery mechanisms, full stop.

I won't develop mobile software unless I know there's an alternate marketing channel.

I do believe there's money to be made, but the way to reach people isn't through the store.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> What's interesting and gruesome about the "free-to-play" (F2P) game market is this:

Game companies can extract the most money from players if they exploit patterns of human dependence and addiction. An understanding of techniques for creating addiction is---in fact---a competitive advantage.

<comment><USER10> They're just like casinos in that respect. The worst part is that some people are very vulnerable to these kinds of tactics, often the people who can least afford it.

On the other hand, reinforcement learning requires systems of rewards - meaning that the games do provide something that is intrinsically valuable to the players (i.e. they must enjoy the game or they wouldn't get "addicted" to it).

How could you clearly tell the difference between a game that has been designed to maximise player enjoyment and a game that has been designed to exploit human addiction? What kind of legislation could be used to protect players? Personally I don't know, I think it's a fascinating subject though.

<comment><USER11> This makes casino look much better then...

With casinos, at least you can convert in-store purchase back to real currency...

Not only you can't do that with in-app-purchase, it often won't survive game uninstall/reinstall, let alone renewing to new device...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Required reading for anyone who has children and indeed for anyone making purchases of any kind, anywhere.

The Behavioural economics page on Wikipedia, [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioural_economics](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioural_economics) is a little dry but a good source of references. I can only claim to be somewhat (vaguely) aware of the subject but having a good introduction from TFA certainly kicked my critical thinking skills out of their complacency.

<comment><USER13> On a related note, for anyone interested in this, I recommend reading "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely[1]. He does actual studies and discusses a lot of these things (bias to loss aversion, change in behaviour when 1-layer detached from cash) and more.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Predictably-Irrational-Revised- Expande...](http://www.amazon.com/Predictably-Irrational-Revised-Expanded- Edition/dp/0061353248)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Interesting stuff. Everything there is straight out of basic behavioural economics. One technique I didn't see mentioned is intermittent rewards. Basically, if you are only rewarded some of the time for performing an action you're more likely to repeat than if you're rewarded every time. See [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement#Intermittent_rein...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement#Intermittent_reinforcements) It's the basic mechanism that drives grinding in games like WoW.

Now the big question is, how better games ("skill games") be monetised? Nobody really wants to play manipulative games, but it's not clear to me how you can effectively monetise free-to-play. Any ideas?

<comment><USER7> On OP's topic, another trick, used very effectively in League of Legends, is to mismatch the cost of store items and the premium currency (in-game cash equivalent). $15 buys 1500 credits, the intended purchase costs maybe 800 - people are more likely to repeat purchase, exploiting the sunk cost fallacy.

Intermittent reinforcement is commonly exploited in the form of thinly disguised gambling in games, it's a huge part of Valve's sales (crates) in Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2.

A few common monetization strategies for skill games:

\- Selling shortcuts. Players don't really mind being given the options of spending money or additional time in game, barring extremes. Indeed, if not made available by the game vendor, this is often handled by 3rd parties - <USER2> market for in game currencies is measured in billions of dollars per year. These shortcuts to a goal can be seen in many games that merely sell additional _options_ which have minimal effect on gameplay.

\- Cosmetics and other status items. Team Fortress 2 is a good example - people will buy anything that makes them look different from everyone else in multiplayer games.

\- Limited time products. Lots of games have started selling bundles (in denominations like $50 and $200) to early adopters that let them distinguish themselves from those who started playing later on or did not pay up. Path of Exile and anything by Perfect World are examples.

Games without any multiplayer elements would likely find it hard to use these.

<comment><USER8> League of Legends is an excellent example of a free-to-play game where purchases don't seem manipulative.

IIRC, they've said that they make most of their money out of the cosmetic aspect ("skins").

The other thing they do is to enable people to pay to get the new game characters ("champions") faster than the free players (who have to "grind" to get them, and carefully consider their purchases).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The kind of techniques described in the article are horrible indeed.

But there's a good kind of F2P. There are games that you download for free, which are essentially a demo. Once you finished that, you can buy the full game via IAP, this is pretty brilliant from a player's perspective. It's a shame that we use the same term for that.

I suppose the good thing about F2P in general is that it might just bring a very important message across to the general public: There is no such thing as a free lunch.

<comment><USER16> Likewise IAP that don't affect gameplay seem to me to be a fairly innocuous way to monetise your player base too, but they probably only work well in multi-player games where they tap into people's desire for individuality and display.

Valve has become a master at this of course, even if they did almost stumble into it by accident when they starting making TF2 hats. They're going down the same route with DOTA2 IIRC.

<comment><USER17> Its unfortunate that it doesn't make enough money to just sell levels as their IAP. The app store competition is very darwinian, and the "strongest" survives - where strong means profit generating.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is a great list of all the things I never want to have in any of the games I work in. Otherwise I would feel as a slimy cheat.

</comment><comment><USER19> > _This is my favorite coercive monetization technique, because it is just so > powerful. The technique involves giving the player some really huge reward, > that makes them really happy, and then threatening to take it away if they > do not spend. Research has shown that humans like getting rewards, but they > hate losing what they already have much more than they value the same item > as a reward._

Eechh...I would hate to play a game like this. It's not just the money factor, but the feeling that I'm being extorted, and that paying is the only way to succeed in the "life" inside this gameworld. This kind of decision would immediately make me ask existential questions like, "Why do I care so much about my status in this virtual world?" and then quit playing.

Then again, I'm someone who is a complete sucker for "Show your appreciation by tipping the creator" type of pitches, maybe even giving more than I would pay for the game's upfront price (in terms of dollars, for mobile games). There's the "reward" of "I'm being such a good gamer, recognizing the hard work of this developer"

<comment><USER20> I experimented with a pay-what-you-want model for a language learning game, and it was always hugely motivating to see players choose to pay 4.99 instead of 0.99. Financially, half of our income has come from players paying more than they need.

On behalf of non-coercive indie game devs, thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Some of the tricks in the article are unbelievable.

>At this point the user must choose to either spend about $1 or lose their rewards, lose their stamina (which they could get back for another $1), and lose their progress.

I can't imagine playing a game that threatened to take away my items if I didn't give them money.

<comment><USER17> its insidious...i would instantly stop playing as soon as i find out, no matter how good the game is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm not a fan of these tactics at all as a developer or a consumer. The simplest way I've found to avoid these games is to cross reference the "Top Free" and "Highest Grossing" lists on the play store.

</comment><comment><USER23> Under-developed "rational" brain before 25 years of age is a funny meme. Most readers should stop here.)

Difference in spending between cach and credit card attributed to "layering" is another meme. Correlation is not causation. The effect is, probably, based on the fact that there almost always bigger sum of money on the card than in cash in a pocket, so, the loss seemed less significant.

As for monetization strategies, it seems that nothing can beat "status items" (same as in so-called real life) such as "armors", "cloches" and all those "things" one could display and compare with others.

But so many papers..)

<comment><USER24> > Under-developed "rational" brain before 25 years of age is a funny meme.

What's funny about it? It seems to be backed by science [1] [2].

[1] [http://hrweb.mit.edu/worklife/youngadult/brain.html](http://hrweb.mit.edu/worklife/youngadult/brain.html)

[2] [http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1411647...](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=141164708)

<comment><USER23> Because one cannot reliable test such assumptions due to multiple very different factors in play (multiple causation). "Prefrontal cortex as the seat of rational brain" is just a meme - a huge over-simplification, as rationality itself.

It is more sane to talk about control of emotions - ability of an activity in one region of the brain interfere with, or tame other activity in a different region, which requires "training" of appropriate "networks" via repeated exposure to certain behavioral patterns (experience). This could be attributed to ageing, that adults just had more practice of self-control, but it will be just another meme, because each process of maturation is unique, due to almost intractable number of factors involved.

Even cross-culturally, my beat is that if some could compare group of "typical US students" with a group of Asian "Buddhist monks" of the same age, there will be significant differences in prefrontal cortex activities.)

Read some Marvin Minsky for great good.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> wow, there's some really subtly evil techniques in there...and yet, these techniques are netting the business owner millions in revenue.

I really wish its possible to earn similar revuenu, but with "clean" tactics (i.e., making a really fun game that also has artistic value). Unfortunately, it seems reality isn't so.

<comment><USER25> Minecraft made $240 million in 2012 and did nothing besides provide good gameplay with regular updates.

Evil tactics like these are not needed.</comment></comment>


The 'Anti-Business' President Who's Been Good for Business - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-obama-anti-business-president/ <comment><USER2> Gonna miss this guy.</comment>